Original title was “A big Seattle name is in the election battlegrounds — helping Trump” which I editorialized primarily to better explain who Kshama Sawant is over the generic “a big Seattle name”.
Original title was “A big Seattle name is in the election battlegrounds — helping Trump” which I editorialized primarily to better explain who Kshama Sawant is over the generic “a big Seattle name”.
Genuinely curious: Has accelerationist theory ever worked out? Does the rise and fall of Nazi Germany count as an example where it “worked out”?
Successful accelerationists tend to be murdered by the people they help put into power.
Depending on your political leaning, the American Revolution comes to mind…
The French Revolution…
Pretty much any revolution makes modern “accelerationists” look like boring moderates on a long enough timescale.
Yeah, I think there’s some sort of survivorship bias going on to encourage accelerationists. They identify the successes and never hear about all the terrible failures. Sometimes making things worse does actually result in mass movements. It’s just that that’s pretty rare and usually it just makes things worse without an awakening, sometimes disastrously. But if it does happen it’ll cause a lot of change and end up in the history books. And in the event it doesn’t the accelerationists probably won’t even be mentioned in the description of the dark times they helped usher in.
And the big problem with all of this is that if people know you’re doing accelerationism, it’s a lot less likely to make people believe in your cause because it just seems like you’re playing a game and detached from people’s actual lives. Because to some extent that’s true and you are.
In the example of Nazi Germany, the closest thing to modern left wing accelerationists helped create the domestic political chaos that Hitler promoted himself as an antidote to.
Shortly after WW1 you had the KPD (Communists/Revolutionary Socialists) and the SPD (Social Democrats/Union Workers).
After WW1 ended, Rosa Luxemburg of the KPD supported a revolutionary overthrow of the government, but was assassinated by right wing paramilitary groups collaborating with the SPD.
This led to the SPD remaining in control, mostly, tentatively, via coalitions, of the Weimar government, but created a whole lot of bad blood between the KPD and SPD.
Throughout the 20s and 30s, the KPD viewed the SPD as their primary enemy, and more than once allied with the Nazis to achieve the downfall of the SPD, though they now were less revolutionary and more electoral reformist.
In 1931, the KPD leader Thalmann declared 'After Hitler, Our Turn!" while instructing the KPD members to vote for a Nazi referendum that would overthrow the SPD government. Though this referendum failed, it caused much dissent within the KPD, as the Nazis grew in power and popularity.
In 1932, the KPD and Nazis both supported a series of labor strikes in Berlin which the SPD, normally aligned with unions, did not support.
This caused the SPD to lose enough seats in the Reichstag that the next government that formed was a coalition led by Nazis, after many months of Nazi paramilitary violence.
At that point, the KPD leaders mostly fled, Hitler was put into power with the SPD providing all the votes against him, and then the SPD and KPD were outlawed, and now we have the Third Reich.
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So this parallels our current political reality broadly: Leftists (or left of center people) fight amongst themselves to their own detriment and ultimately accelerate the rise of a right wing authoritarian strong man who promises domestic stability, but ends up creating even more chaos and destruction.
If your leftist accelerationist goal is destroy as much as possible so the new world can maybe? rise from the ashes, then sure Germany is a good example of that working.
If your leftist accelerationist goal is get to communism as fast as possible by deft, 12-d chess political maneuvers including allying with fascists, then uh, no, Germany is a perfect example of that backfiring in the most horrible way imaginable.